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Dessert

Velvet Cakes

Velvet Cakes are a sweet baked dessert made with sugar, butter, eggs, sweet milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, corn starch, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Velvet Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately until well combined.

  3. Add the egg yolks, sweet milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, corn starch, and lemon juice to the butter mixture.

  4. Mix until smooth and well incorporated.

Bake

  1. Spoon the batter into patty pans.

  2. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks add richness and moisture, and beaten whites help give the cakes lift and a light structure.
Butter
Creaming butter with sugar traps air and adds fat for a tender, rich texture.
Sugar
Sugar creams with butter to create air pockets and adds sweetness and gentle browning.
Corn starch
Starch softens the crumb by diluting gluten, giving the cakes a fine, velvety texture.
Baking soda
Baking soda reacts with the acidic ingredients to produce gas that makes the cakes rise.
Cream of tartar
Cream of tartar is an acid that helps stabilize the whites and works with baking soda to aid rising.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar. Beating butter and sugar until light and fluffy traps air in the fat, which expands in the oven and gives the cakes lift. Under-creaming leads to dense, heavy cakes.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, milk, cream, corn):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, milk, cream, corn. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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